New Book Reveals That Sony Could Have Bought Every Marvel Character For Only $25 Million

A new book reveals that Sony Pictures was once given the opportunity to buy nearly every Marvel superhero but turned down the offer for a very unexpected reason! Hit the jump to find out the full story.

Since Iron Man was released in 2008, Marvel Studios has produced hit after hit. While Spider-Man eluded Kevin Feige's grasp for quite some time, the failure of The Amazing Spider-Man franchise brought the wall-crawler home (on loan, at least) and it now appears as if Disney's acquisition of the Fantastic Four and X-Men is going to result in those characters meeting up with The Avengers too.

A new book by Ben Fritz titled The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies delves into the deal which saw Spider-Man become part of Sony's empire and it turns out that the studio made perhaps the biggest mistake in Hollywood history a good twenty years ago. In an excerpt from the book, it's revealed that a young Sony Pictures executive named Yair Landau reached out to Marvel to acquire the rights to Spider-Man during a time the company was having to sell its assets following bankruptcy.

Desperate for cash, Marvel boss Ike Perlmutter made a pretty surprising offer; Sony could have the movie rights to Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Black Panther, The Avengers, and more for the bargain price of only $25 million. Landau rushed back to Sony's studio execs bt the response he received was not what he expected: "Nobody gives a sh—about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man." As a result, the wall-crawler sold for just $10 million.

Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 grossed $1.6 billion alone a few years later but Sony could have had so much more with the rest of those characters in their possession. Would they have found the same level off success as the MCU? It's doubtful but still interesting to think about what might have been...

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